Wisconsin Wal-Mart Workers Mull Union

Workers at a Wal-Mart store in Wisconsin were voting Friday on whether to join the United Steelworkers union, the first time employees of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in the United States have voted on unionizing, officials said.

About 90 of the 120 full- and part-time workers at the Wal-Mart store in Merrill, Wis., were eligible to vote in the election on whether to join the United Steelworkers of America. The union represents workers in steelmaking, retailing and other industries.

“We have a petition from the steelworkers, who are wanting to represent our associates in the store only in Merrill,” said Betsy Reithemeyer, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.

Of Wal-Mart’s 780,000 employees worldwide, only workers at a Wal-Mart store in Windsor, Canada, belong to a union, she said. The world’s biggest retailer has defeated most other unionization attempts since it was founded in Arkansas by Sam Walton in 1962. It has relied heavily on stock incentives to motivate its relatively low-paid work force.

Although union elections have been held at the company’s Sam’s Club warehouse stores and other operations, they have not been held at a domestic Wal-Mart store before, she said.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., had 1996 sales of $104.8 billion. On Friday, Wal-Mart shares fell $1 to close at $37.06 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Results of the vote were expected Friday night. Merrill, a town of about 10,000, is 160 miles north of Madison.

“The federal law is, if there were 90 [voters], you need 46” to approve the petition, said Bob Glaser of the United Steelworkers of America in Milwaukee.

Union supporters are pressing for representation to win higher wages, scheduling by seniority and a formal procedure for settling grievances.

Pat Schafer, a labor organizer for the United Steelworkers in Wisconsin, said hourly wages paid in Merrill range from minimum wage to about $14 an hour.

However, the union determined that the most any Wal-Mart worker below the level of supervisor earned is about $8 an hour, Schafer said. “And not many people have the $8.”

Some industry analysts said a companywide effort to organize Wal-Mart workers would raise concerns about higher wages. But they said unionizing the retailer, which has 3,000 stores and affiliates worldwide, would be a huge undertaking.

Unionization “has really been a nonissue,” said one analyst who asked not to be identified. “I don’t really know what the union can offer over and above what [Wal-Mart employees] got. I think Wal-Mart takes pretty good care of its employees.”

“That’s not to say that in some markets you couldn’t unionize,” said Wayne Hood at Prudential Securities. “But I think people generally like working at Wal-Mart. As large as it is, it still has a lot of small-town roots to it.”

A unionized store would strike at the very heart of Wal-Mart tradition and culture, said Wendy Liebmann, president of WSL Strategic Retail, a consulting firm in New York. “Their philosophy has been, ‘We look after our workers and give them the incentive of sharing in the profits and being stockholders,’ ” she said.